Designer Profile

Umit Benan was born to Turkish parents in Germany in 1980, and raised in Istanbul. As a kid in the 80s, he was bombarded with the assertive fashions and powerful masculine visions of the time, thanks to his clothing manufacturer father. As a teen in the 90s, he absorbed the contrasts and layering of the decade while growing up away from home at boarding school and university, in Switzerland and the US. His utterly personal point of view stems from these roots. He moved to Boston to study marketing and public relations at college. During his time in the United States he decided to become a fashion designer and spent summers in Milan taking drawing lessons. Umit Benan moved to Milan to study fashion at Marangoni Institute. Over the next years, he alternated between styling courses at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, and spent a year in Parsons The New School for Design in New York for pattern making and long periods in Istanbul learning textile techniques with his father. After his work experiences in womenswear at Marc Jacobs, Sophie Theallet and Rifat Ozbek, in 2009 he launched his eponymous menswear line and won the first men’s edition of the Who’s On Next competition by Alta Roma (in collaboration with Pitti Immagine and L’Uomo Vogue) with his second collection. Between the years 2011 and 2013 Umit Benan leaded the Creative Direction of the maison Trussardi, designing both menswear and womenswear ready to wear and accessories lines. In 2012, Umit Benan was choosen as best international menswear line in Japan. As a consequence in 2014 he opened his first UMIT BENAN flagship store in Tokyo and launched his casual line ONIKI made in Japan. He now presents his collections during Paris Fashion Week.

Category

Men's / Ready To Wear, Shoes, Bags, Accessories and others